All of the updates about OpenAI

OpenAI has officially closed its nearly $6.5 billion acquisition of io, the hardware startup co-founded by famed former Apple designer Jony Ive, the company announced Wednesday. But it was careful to only refer to the startup as io Products Inc.

The blog post initially announcing the acquisition was also scrubbed from OpenAI’s website due to a trademark lawsuit from Iyo, the hearing device startup spun out of Google’s moonshot factory.

Thanks to a related trademark lawsuit, we know what OpenAI and Jony Ive’s first AI device won’t be.

In court filings submitted this month, leaders from io — the consumer hardware team OpenAI recently acquired from Jony Ive’s design studio for $6.5 billion — testified that the first device they plan to release won’t be an “in-ear device” or a “wearable.” They also say the AI device won’t ship until “at least” 2026.

OpenAI has scrubbed mentions of io, the hardware startup co-founded by famous Apple designer Jony Ive, from its website and social media channels. The sudden change closely follows their recent announcement of OpenAI’s nearly $6.5 billion acquisition and plans to create dedicated AI hardware.

OpenAI tells The Verge the deal is still happening, but it scrubbed mentions due to a trademark lawsuit from Iyo, the hearing device startup spun out of Google’s moonshot factory.

OpenAI’s ChatGPT service was down all day for many users after the platform started experiencing performance issues on Tuesday morning. The chatbot responded with a “Hmm…something seems to have gone wrong” error message to my colleague after failing to load, and users across X and Reddit are reporting platform outages.

Downdetector showed that issues started at around 3AM ET, with multiple regions impacted globally. OpenAI’s own status page said that some users started experiencing “elevated error rates and latency” at that time, noting that the issues were affecting ChatGPT, its Sora text-to-video AI tool, and OpenAI APIs. OpenAI added a separate line for “elevated error rates on Sora” at 5:23AM ET, and later updated the status for both to “partial outage.”

The leaders of OpenAI and Google have been living rent-free in each other’s heads since ChatGPT caught the world by storm. Heading into this week’s I/O, Googlers were on edge about whether Sam Altman would try to upstage their show like last year, when OpenAI held an event the day before to showcase ChatGPT’s advanced voice mode.

This time, OpenAI dropped its bombshell the day after.

OpenAI is buying io, a hardware company founded by former Apple design chief Jony Ive and several other former engineers from his time there, including Scott Cannon, Evans Hankey, and Tang Tan.

Ive won’t be joining OpenAI, and his design firm, LoveFrom, will continue to be independent, but they will “take over design for all of OpenAI, including its software,” in a deal valued at nearly $6.5 billion, Bloomberg reports.

If Google is forced to sell off Chrome, ChatGPT’s head of product told a judge today that OpenAI would be interested in buying the browser, Reuters reports.

Google breaking off Chrome is a proposed remedy by the US Department of Justice in US v. Google, in which Judge Amit Mehta ruled last year that the company is a monopolist in online search. The remedies phase of the trial began on Monday. Google plans to appeal the ruling.

OpenAI has revealed the “advisors” for its new nonprofit commission: Dolores Huerta, Monica Lozano, Dr. Robert K. Ross, and Jack Oliver. The company says the four advisors will help “inform OpenAI’s philanthropic efforts,” according to an announcement on Tuesday.

Huerta was a prominent labor activist during the 20th century, while Lozano was the president and CEO of the College Futures Foundation and is a member of Apple’s board of directors. Ross previously served as president and CEO of the health and wellness foundation The California Endowment, and OpenAI says Oliver is a “leader in government, technology, business and advocacy.”

OpenAI is working on its own X-like social network, according to multiple sources familiar with the matter.

While the project is still in early stages, we’re told there’s an internal prototype focused on ChatGPT’s image generation that has a social feed. CEO Sam Altman has been privately asking outsiders for feedback about the project, our sources say. It’s unclear if OpenAI’s plan is to release the social network as a separate app or integrate it into ChatGPT, which became the most downloaded app globally last month. An OpenAI spokesperson didn’t respond in time for publication.

OpenAI has introduced GPT-4.1, a successor to the GPT-4o multimodal AI model launched by the company last year. During a livestream on Monday, OpenAI said GPT-4.1 has an even larger context window and is better than GPT-4o in “just about every dimension,” with big improvements to coding and instruction following.

GPT-4.1 is now available to developers, along with two smaller model versions. That includes GPT-4.1 Mini, which, like its predecessor, is more affordable for developers to tinker with, and GPT-4.1 Nano, an even more lightweight model that OpenAI says is its “smallest, fastest, and cheapest” one yet.

OpenAI filed a countersuit against Elon Musk on Wednesday, saying on X that “Elon’s nonstop actions against us are just bad-faith tactics to slow down OpenAI and seize control of the leading AI innovations for his personal benefit.”

In the lawsuit, OpenAI’s lawyers argue that “Musk’s continued attacks on OpenAI, culminating most recently in the fake takeover bid designed to disrupt OpenAI’s future, must cease. Musk should be enjoined from further unlawful and unfair action, and held responsible for the damage he has already caused.”

Two leading AI labs, OpenAI and Anthropic, just announced major initiatives in higher education. It’s the constant one-upping we’ve all become familiar with: this week, Anthropic dropped their announcement at 8 AM Wednesday, while OpenAI followed with nearly identical news at 8 AM Thursday.

For Anthropic, this week’s announcement was its first major academic push. It launched Claude for Education, a university-focused version of its chatbot. The company also announced partnerships with Northeastern University, London School of Economics (LSE), and Champlain College, along with with Internet2, which builds university tech infrastructure, and Instructure (maker of Canvas) to increase “equitable access to tools that support universities as they integrate AI.”

OpenAI has raised $40 billion in a new investment round led by SoftBank, vaulting the company to a $300 billion valuation. It’s the largest funding round for a private tech company in history, according to CNBC.

OpenAI is set to receive $10 billion up front (SoftBank will invest $7.5 billion along with $2.5 billion “from an investor syndicate,“ according to Bloomberg). The remaining $30 billion is slated to arrive by year’s end, CNBC reported — but only if it officially converts into a for-profit company by then. If not, it reportedly stands to lose a quarter of the deal.

When I saw my colleague Kylie Robison’s story about OpenAI’s new image generator on Tuesday, I thought this week might be fun. Generative AI images raise all kinds of ethical issues, but I find them wildly entertaining, and I spent large chunks of that day watching other Verge staff test ChatGPT in ways that covered the entire spectrum, from cute to cursed.

But on Thursday afternoon, the White House decided to spoil it. Its X account posted a photograph of a crying detainee that it bragged was an arrested fentanyl trafficker and undocumented immigrant. Then it added an almost certainly AI-generated cartoon of an officer handcuffing the sobbing woman — not attributed to any particular tool, but in the unmistakable style of ChatGPT’s super-popular Studio Ghibli imitations, which have flooded the internet over the past week.

The fervor around ChatGPT’s more accessible (and more advanced) image generation capabilities has forced OpenAI to “temporarily” put a rate limit on image generation requests, according to CEO Sam Altman. “It’s super fun seeing people love images in ChatGPT, but our GPUs are melting,” he posted on X today. Altman didn’t specify what the rate limit is, but said the safeguard “hopefully” won’t need to be in place for very long as OpenAI tries to increase its efficiency in handling the avalanche of requests.

The demand crunch already caused the artificial intelligence company to push back availability of the built-in image generator for users on ChatGPT’s free tier. But apparently that measure alone wasn’t enough to ease the stress on OpenAI’s infrastructure. (Altman said free users will “soon” be able to generate up to three images per day.)

AI-generated images have made significant progress since the days of abstract renderings and glitchy amalgamations. OpenAI’s newly released “Images for ChatGPT” has an uncanny ability to nail depth, shadows, and even text. It’s unleashed a frenzy of people recreating a familiar style: Hayao Miyazaki’s work at Studio Ghibli. The art style was already ubiquitous across the internet, thanks to its comforting, soft aesthetic (just look at Lofi girl) — and now, it’s a fully automated formula.

The trend kicked off pretty wholesomely. Couples transformed portraits, pet owners generated cartoonish cats, and many people are busily Ghibli-fying their families (I’ve stuck to selfies, not wanting to share with OpenAI my siblings’ likenesses). It’s an AI-generated version of the human-drawn art commissions people offer on Etsy — you and your loved ones, in the style of your favorite anime.

OpenAI is pushing back the rollout of ChatGPT’s built-in image generator for free users. In a post on Wednesday, CEO Sam Altman admitted that the image-generation tool is more popular than he expected, adding that “rollout to our free tier is unfortunately going to be delayed for awhile.”

OpenAI only just added image generation capabilities to ChatGPT on Tuesday, allowing users to create images directly within the app using the company’s reasoning model, GPT-4o. Since its launch, users have flooded social media feeds with photos transformed into images generated in the style of Studio Ghibli, a trend that even Altman has gotten in on.

OpenAI is integrating new image generation capabilities directly into ChatGPT starting today — this feature is dubbed “Images in ChatGPT.” Users can now use GPT-4o to generate images within ChatGPT itself.

This initial release focuses solely on image creation and will be available across ChatGPT Plus, Pro, Team, and Free subscription tiers. The free tier’s usage limit is the same as DALL-E, spokesperson Taya Christianson told The Verge, but added that they “didn’t have a specific number to share” and ”these may change over time based on demand.“ Per the ChatGPT FAQ, free users were previously able to generate “three images per day with DALL·E 3.” As for the fate of DALL-E, Christianson said “fans” will “still have access via a custom GPT.”

In a significant executive shuffle announced Monday, OpenAI is expanding COO Brad Lightcap’s responsibilities while CEO Sam Altman shifts his attention more toward the company’s technical direction. The news was first reported by Bloomberg.

Lightcap will now “oversee day-to-day operations,” international expansion, and manage key partnerships with tech giants like Microsoft and Apple, according to Bloomberg. OpenAI has also promoted Mark Chen to chief research officer (he was recently SVP of research) and Julia Villagra to chief people officer (she was formerly VP of people).

A privacy complaint has been filed against OpenAI by a Norwegian man who claims that ChatGPT described him as a convicted murderer who killed two of his own children and attempted to kill a third.

Arve Hjalmar Holmen says that he wanted to find out what ChatGPT would say about him, but was presented with the false claim that he had been convicted for both murder and attempted murder, and was serving 21 years in a Norwegian prison. Alarmingly, the ChatGPT output mixes fictitious details with facts, including his hometown and the number and gender of his children.

When AI giant OpenAI submitted its “freedom-focused” policy proposal to the White House’s AI Action Plan last Thursday, it gave the Trump administration an industry wishlist: use trade laws to export American AI dominance against the looming threat of China, loosen copyright restrictions for training data (also to fight China), invest untold billions in AI infrastructure (again: China), and stop states from smothering it with hundreds of new laws.

But specifically, one law: SB 1047, California’s sweeping, controversial, and for now, defeated AI safety bill.